Other bodies, Other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem

Abstract

Explaining the mind by building machines with minds runs into the
other-minds problem: How can we tell whether any body other than our own has a
mind when the only way to know is by being the other body? In practice we all use
some form of Turing Test: If it can do everything a body with a mind can do such
that we can't tell them apart, we have no basis for doubting it has a mind. But what
is "everything" a body with a mind can do? Turing's original "pen-pal" version (the
TT) only tested linguistic capacity, but Searle has shown that a mindless
symbol-manipulator could pass the TT undetected. The Total Turing Test (TTT)
calls for all of our linguistic and robotic capacities; immune to Searle's argument, it
suggests how to ground a symbol manipulating system in the capacity to pick out
the objects its symbols refer to. No Turing Test, however, can guarantee that a
body has a mind. Worse, nothing in the explanation of its successful performance
requires a model to have a mind at all. Minds are hence very different from the
unobservables of physics (e.g., superstrings); and Turing Testing, though essential
for machine-modeling the mind, can really only yield an explanation of the body.

References in Article

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Alcock, J. E. (1987) Parapsychology: Science of the anomalous or search for the